From the Panhandle

It’s almost Easter, bringing to mind spring, green grass, daffodils, bunnies….

But here in Sandpoint, the grass is white with frost, the temperature is well below freezing, and tiny white flakes are drifting down aimlessly from an icy gray sky.

What happened to spring this year? In the mountains, the snowpack continues to increase (although the ski area has closed), and in the garden, the tulip leaves have emerged from the ground, but the flowers refuse to bloom.

From the Idaho Panhandle

An animal usually associated with the distant University of Michigan and a superhero movie has seemingly suddenly assumed popularity in the inland Northwest: Wolverines are medium-size mustelids that are furry and reputedly feisty, definitely not seekers of the limelight, but they appear to have captured it anyway.

These animals are not considered endangered, but conservation groups have petitioned for their listing three times, and the wolverine is now considered a candidate for protection under the Endangered Species Act. Several studies are underway that may help determine whether such a listing is justified.

The Friends of Scotchman Peaks Wilderness spurred some of the local interest when they helped Idaho Fish and Game set up a monitoring site as part of a larger study of wolverines in the West Cabinets. 

From the Idaho Panhandle

The glittering literati of the panhandle assembled last Friday night for their annual spelling showdown, which drew a passel of new and highly capable teams this year. The new talent proved to be the downfall of the two-time past winners from Keokee Publishing, last year competing as the Swine Fluezies and this year as Spelled Milk.

The ultimate winner was the Sophisticated Sesquipedalians, an elegantly outfitted trio sponsored by D.A. Davidson & Co. 

From the Panhandle: North Idaho Blog

Spokane’s weekly newspaper the Northwest Inlander reported toward the end of last year that neighboring Bonner County, Idaho, had had 740 more nuisance bear complaints for 2010 than any other county in Idaho. According to Sandpoint’s local paper, the Bonner County Bee, the county had a total for the year of 770 calls, while the three counties to the south—Kootenai, Shoshone, and Benewah—had just 27 combined.

We in the panhandle seem to be a perennial problem population with respect to large wild animals. Moose have been wandering into Sandpoint for the past three winters, and bears seem to visit rural dwellers frequently, with the rare foray into town. Fish & Game and law enforcement continuously try to educate the populace about how best to interact with these animals, and they have consistently decried homeowners’ efforts to feed the wild visitors. 

From the Idaho Panhandle

Sandpoint’s soggy winter carnival got a significant boost this year from the addition of skijoring to the annual festivities. Posters advertising the event were everywhere around town, and as the Pineapple Express approached along with the first day of competition, boosters reminded a skeptical public that the grandstand seats at the fairgrounds were all under a roof, so that watchers could be out of the rain even if competitors were not.

In skijoring, a horse and rider race around a U-shaped course while towing a skier; skiers have to negotiate gates and jumps while going as fast as the horse can tow them. In addition to the riding and skiing skills it requires, the event revives the archaic skill of holding a moving rope while skiing—one that many ancient skiers will remember from their experiences with rope tows.

From the Idaho Panhandle

A recent article in the local paper helped us Sandpointers be more appreciative of some ethereal public art that appears every year as Christmas approaches and disappears as the days begin to lengthen again thereafter. We can perhaps be forgiven for having taken it for granted, as it’s been a hallmark of our winter downtown for a decade.

Every Christmas season, wintry paintings appear on the storefront windows of many businesses in the blocks at the heart of town. Every window is different, but they’re all variations on the same theme. Nothing overtly Christmas-y, like Santa or elves or Jesus, they’re more stylized—snowflakes, stars, swirls, and branch-like things that look like sheaves of wheat with snow on them, along with the occasional tree. The palette is simple and unified: they’re all white.

From the Panhandle: North Idaho Blog

In the excitement and enjoyment of significantly greater than usual snowfall over the past few weeks, the challenge of getting to Grandma’s house for the turkey, the closing of schools due to extreme cold, the general search for snow shovels, and the scramble to get the car off the street before the plow arrived, I’m not at all sure that adequate appreciation has been shown for some of the gnarliest participants in this frigid drama: the diehard anglers who participate in the Lake Pend Oreille Idaho Club’s Fall Fishing Derby.

From the Idaho Panhandle

A recent bit in The River Journal (“A Newsmagazine Worth Wading Through” published in Clark Fork) notes that someone saw something on the Internet indicating that the ubiquitous “they” were going to put lithium in our drinking water to help us happily weather the recession that, as we all know (or at least as we’re all told), is well on its way to being over anyway.

The writer, Trish Gannon, whose title on the journal’s masthead is “Calm Center of Tranquility,” might be expected to find such supplements superfluous. But her source, local geoscientist John Monks, checked out the National Uranium Resource Evaluation database—a handy collection of data from water samples collected and analyzed by the U.S. Geological Survey—to identify the extent to which panhandle residents are being chemically mollified.

From the Idaho Panhandle

The Idaho Conservation League held a kaffeeklatsch yesterday morning at Monarch Mountain Coffee House in Sandpoint to encourage local sippers to support water monitoring in the state.

According to ICL, water monitoring costs less than 30 cents per person per year, but it represents one of many cuts that have been made to the state budget in these cost-conscious times. Restoring the funding now would attract matching federal funding, and more important, it would enable us to keep collecting data that would identify problems early, so they can be addressed before they become big and expensive.

From the Idaho Panhandle

One outcome of the elections a few weeks ago was completely passed over by the pundits on TV, but it will have a significant effect on residents of and visitors to central Bonner County.  I refer, of course, to the passage of a bed tax in the community of Ponderay, a burg of 1000 or so souls just north of Sandpoint. By a margin of 140 to 48, voters in that community approved a 5% tax to be assessed on short-term stays in the town’s hotels and motels. Added to funding from several other sources, proceeds from this tax will provide for a bus system that will connect Ponderay with neighbors Kootenai and Sandpoint, as well as the town of Dover, three miles west of Sandpoint.

Despite the burden it will put on them to collect the tax, a majority of lodging owners and operators in Ponderay supported the measure.